Little details

We've made a few small home decor purchases recently that I wanted to share.

While our $2 plastic Ikea knobs were cute...

...these glass ones in shades of blue really class up our dresser. The online store sells some really lovely knobs and door pulls.

 We replaced a boring clock on our bookshelf with...what else? A book clock! Isn't it neat?

We're still on the fence about our last acquisition. After we had seating shortages during a Super Bowl party, we decided to buy some extras, so we bought this pouf from CB2 (pouf seems like a really politically incorrect term, but that really does seem to be what these are called).

It's a little bigger than we expected so it won't slide under the sofa or coffee table. It's also a lot firmer than we thought it would be, so it doesn't seem like it would be very comfortable to sit on, which, of course, is what we bought it for. Might be time to make our own with some poly-fil or bean-bag filler, but honestly I'd much rather be lazy and buy something. There are some lovely Turkish and Moroccan styles available, but they are all pretty expensive and don't look any more comfortable. Etsy sells covers, so that might be something. Any suggestions from you? It's been a while since we got any comments.

Walking on (thin) ice

Despite all our efforts to make our home more energy efficient and better heated, our work is never done. I guess that's just a fact of life for any home over fifty years old. During a cold snap a few weeks ago, we noticed that the floor in our office was quite chilly, even though the crawl space below it was now insulated and the heat in the room actually works.

On closer inspection, D saw that there was actually a small gap below the baseboards, allowing cold air to blow between the office and the crawl space. I protested that the crawl space ceiling (i.e. the office floor) had been thoroughly insulated so the space should not matter, but D pointed out that insulated still did not necessarily imply that it could sustain a comfortable room temperature. The crawl space is, after all, more a part of the outside than the inside.

Time for some props. We brought out some Great Stuff Gaps & Cracks. It expands once it's in place to help fill, well, gaps and cracks.

Applying it was pretty easy (says the person who watched and photographed without actually participating):

You can see in these two pictures exactly how it looked as we were applying it. D deposited the strip of foam across the whole line were the floor meets the wall across the two walls with baseboard heat, which also happen to be the two exterior walls of the room. The hardest part of the project was moving the furniture out of the way.

(Also scary to see all the dust that had gathered behind said furniture...Makes me wonder what is lurking behind the piano in the living room, the one giant piece of furniture we own that is not on high enough legs for us to see underneath.)

I can't tell yet if we're seeing any real improvement. The temperature outside this winter has swung between frigid and spring-like, so we haven't had enough cold days in a row to judge the floor temperature (with a very unscientific walking around bare-foot test). But in any case this small fix won't hurt.

A Hairy Situation

I have long hair. It likes to escape down the drain when I shower and the new drain cover didn't do a very good job of stopping it. So every few weeks D has to do a minor unclog. He's become quite the plumber and insists that he doesn't mind. And it only takes him a few minutes.

Recently, however, we had a clogged drain that resisted all of our "quick" attempts at unclogging (mostly all related to the miraculous Zip-It). When that didn't work, D pulled off all of the drain hardware and used an actual plumbers' snake to try to fix the problem. Still no luck. Our temporary solution was to switch to using the other shower and wait until we had more time to deal with it (we avoid chemical drain cleaners because of the fumes and our fear that they will eat through our very old pipes).

That worked pretty well until I decided to fill up the sink in the bathroom to do some hand wash laundry and then let it drain all at once. It would seem that the sink and tub were connected enough that letting a sink full of water go down the drain sent a back-up of sludge into the tub. Oops!

Fast forward past the part where we scrambled for towels and did quick damage control on most of the gunk.

Because D had removed the drain, the pipe wasn't fully connected to the tub and the water back-up allowed water to drain past the pipe and into the walls. Fortunately we have an access panel in our bedroom to get to the leak. It very nearly filled up the little plastic container we managed to shove in to catch the leak (most of the leak - some got onto the wood, so we kept the panel open for quite a while with a box fan circulating the air).

Waiting until we had more time to deal with the clog stopped being an option. We were dealing with the clog "now" (which, of course, wasn't a very good time, but isn't that always the case?).

Step one was to use plumbers' putty to reseal the area around the pipe and to reinstall the hardware, to prevent any potential back-ups from going into the walls again. Next, since obviously the clog seemed to be affecting the sink area as well as the tub, D turned to the sink for his next attempt to snake out the clog.

Back when we had a major clog in our basement utility sink, D bought a 25-foot plumbers' snake. It has certainly paid for itself (all $20 or something) in saved plumber costs and this time was no exception. D was able to snake almost the entire 25 feet from this spot and managed to pull out a wad of hair (I'll spare you the pictures of that one). He wasn't able to access it from the tub area but evidently this angle did the trick.

D has been saying for a year that he doesn't mind doing a little unclogging every few weeks, but I never liked that solution (and even included it on our honey-do list this past September). This time I convinced him that the old drain hardware wasn't working. For every few minor unclogs, there could be a major one as well. So we explored Home Depot and eventually came on the simplest solution:

We didn't go through the whole ordeal of putting in a stopper mechanism up at the overflow vent, but we were able to install the new grate without a screw by just enlarging the center hole and popping it on the existing bolt. So that makes it easy to pop off and replace with the original stopper (currently sitting on the little ledge in the upper left of the picture). And now most of my hair doesn't go down the drain and is easy to wipe away. Hopefully we can avoid such a dramatic clog for a while now.